07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Bite-sized MobileRead for your weekend pleasure:

E-books - News

• British novelist doesn't want a Kindle for Christmas
• Article on Linux and E Ink displays
• Ads for Adobe PDF powered by Yahoo, to be launched
• Adobe executives point the finger at Amazon Kindle

E-book Devices - Sony Portable Reader

• Kindle publicity that's good for Sony, too

E-book Devices - Amazon Kindle

• NYT's Pogues on Kindle: 'Wow'
• Walt Mossberg reviews the Kindle in the WSJ
• iRex welcomes Kindle, puzzled over proprietary e-book format

Mobile Devices - General Talk

• Upgrade your cell phone with widgets

Mobile Devices - Handhelds and Smartphones

• Google Maps beta for phones now shows your location without GPS

09:43 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

While the upcoming Adobe Digital Editions 1.5 release is not exactly latest news, PC Mag has an interesting commentary on what Adobe thinks of the Amazon Kindle launch:

Ironically, Adobe executives criticized the closed nature of the rival Amazon Kindle e-book platform -- even as their own Digital Editions customers are currently locked into a single device, albeit a PC. An Adobe spokesman also noted that the company is a partner of Sony and its existing Sony Reader, which can display .PDF files.

"Right now the Kindle is a closed platform, as you're aware," said Bill McCoy, general manager of the ePublishing business at Adobe, in an interview. "It's a fixed device; content can't be read on any other device, such as an iPhone. It's a closed ecosystem, even more so than iTunes and the iPod."

So what else do we got? PDF of course. And ePub. Let the e-book death match begin.

01:26 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Readers | Amazon Kindle

A bouquet of flowers to the fine people at iRex for their courage in embracing Amazon's launch of the Kindle reader. Karel Byloos, Community Manager at iRex:

With the launch, Amazon created a significant hype and wave of interest in the media, and at this stage the first priority and concern for e-reader manufacturers is to develop the market rather than to compete for market share and in that perspective the entry of another big name like Amazon is certainly stimulating the market growth and will benefit all the current active players on the market.

Well, if it wasn't for Amazon's proprietary e-book format, AWZ, which is based on the Mobipocket format but presumably uses a slightly different way to authorize e-books.

Personally, I am bit puzzled by this and the choice of format and I wonder if the world really needs another. The Amazon owned Mobipocket format is already widely available and supported across many platforms including other e-readers like the Cybook and the iLiad. By supporting only a single format unique to Kindle, they have created another closed system.

Read the full statement over at the iRex Blog.

Related discussion: Amazon MobiPocket files and the Iliad

09:11 PM by jasonkchapman in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

This comes from the Rising-Tide-Raises-All-Boats department.

A side-by-side review in USA Today titled "E-book Readersby Sony, Amazon have their charms" actually does a nice job of pointing out the pluses and minuses of both units. In general, it puts the whole e-book industry in front of a bunch more eyeballs.

04:44 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Who said PDF documents didn't serve any purpose (well, except to make it difficult to read on devices with small screens)? Eager to tap into the growing market for online advertisement, Amazon is now teaming up with Yahoo's ad service to deliver contextual ads to PDF documents. From the Wall Street Journal:

Now, publishers will be able to show ads alongside their PDFs without selling and inserting the ads themselves, by uploading the PDF content to Adobe's Web site to ad-enable it, then distributing the PDFs as they previously did -- an easier and less costly option. Advertisers, meanwhile, can use Yahoo's existing self-service ad system to buy text ads that will run in a panel to the right of the PDF, when it is viewed in Acrobat or Reader. Yahoo will use the text of the PDF to place contextual ads that are relevant to the subject matter of the PDF -- similar to the text ads that run in blogs, for instance.

If you are a publisher and want to join the current beta test, go to this webpage for sign-up.

Don't place your bets just yet, but maybe, and I am really just fantasizing here, prices for e-books will further go down as publishers will happily embrace this service as a new source for income.

The question is: As a consumer, will you accept ads in e-texts if this means you've to pay less for content?

Update: Thanks to John for sending us these additional links. Adobe Labs, FAQ (PDF), Sample

02:17 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book Readers | Amazon Kindle

If you have been waiting for Walt Mossberg's take on the Kindle, your wait is over.

About the Sony Reader (the obvious comparison point), he says that "Like the iPod, it was linked to an online store where you could buy thousands of titles that could be downloaded to the Reader. Unlike the iPod, it hasn't been a hit with consumers, partly because the store was hard to use and had a very limited selection."

And about the Kindle, "...I love the shopping and downloading experience. But the Kindle device itself is just mediocre. While it has good readability, battery life and storage capacity, both its hardware design and its software user interface are marred by annoying flaws. It is bigger and clunkier to use than the Sony Reader, whose second version has just come out at $300."

He sums it up with the following: "Amazon has nailed the electronic-book shopping experience. But it has a lot to learn about designing electronic devices."

The whole article is available here for a few days without an online WSJ subscription.

Thanks to radleyp and Jane from DearAuthor for the tip.

10:25 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

Kevin Tofel has a great article in the NY Times today (free password required) about how you can add widgets to your "regular" cell phone to get features like Sudoku and Flicker and Twitter.

A big congratulations to Kevin Tofel, who we already know is a great writer and a big part of the excellent JKOnTheRun mobile computing blog. Now through the NY Times, the "real" world can also read what he has to offer!

By the way, you may want to check out www.bugmenot.com if you don't like those free registrations at the NY Times and other common sites.

09:11 AM by wallcraft in E-Book General | News

The Linux World article Kernel space: E-paper support for Linux by Jaya Kumar is a technical description of the unique aspects of persistent e-paper displays and techniques for driving E Ink's Apollo and Metronome controllers.

Apollo is used by the Cybook Gen3, Amazon Kindle, and Sony PRS-500, while (the newer) Metronome is used by the Sony PRS-505.

Anyone want to roll their own E Ink Reader? This article certainly makes this appear possible, but still a daunting task.